Do you see the applications in vR Ops that you think you should?

I am used to VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) (or is it now VMware vRealize Infrastructure Navigator?) in the vSphere Web Client showing me the Apps on a VM or host and that helps me deal with change control or letting people know of the impact. Plus if I am sneaking in a restart or something I know what is impacted. See below for an example.

However, you will not see applications that are seen like that in vR Ops at the current time. Unless you do something special that I will show you later. The only apps you will see in vR Ops are ones that you specifically configure for automatic detection. Which of course I did not do at first.

It is done in the VIN area after you select it from the vSphere Web Client home screen. See below what I have configured to recognize automatically.

So anything that VIN identifies will NOT be seen in vR Ops. But anything you ask VIN to identify – as seen above – will in fact be seen in vR Ops.

To confirm this most easily, log into vR Ops as the admin. Not equivalent but as the admin. This is due to a bug. Then you will see the VIN dashboards and you can select the one called VI \ VIN Application Topology. See below for an example.

The VIN dashboards are only seen by the actual admin account – at least in my lab and VMware support is looking into it. And yes, the name for the app as seen in vR Ops looks very odd, and yes, that too had been reported to VMware support and they are looking into it.

You can configure a surprising list of apps quite easily to be automatically recognized and get them into vR Ops.

Hope this helps someone avoid the frustration I went through!

Update:

3/21/16 – occurs in 6.2 as well. Workaround still works too.

11/15/15 – this occurs in 6.1 too. So this workaround still works.

3/12/15 – figured out the issue with VIN dashboards not seen by other admins. Find out how here.

2 thoughts on “Do you see the applications in vR Ops that you think you should?”

I too just finished installing VIN and its management pack.
And like you, I couldn’t find the dashboard until I read your article and tried the user “admin” and it worked; I can now see the VIN Application Topology and VIN VM Dependencies in the list of dashboards.

Also, the same issue of not being able to see a list of applications that are defined by default by VIN, whether I’m using my domain account or the built-in “admin” account !!!

If you got any updates from VMware support, appreciate if you could share the info.

Thanks Ahmed for the comments. I confirmed my findings with VMware support and they are aware of most but not all and we should see fixes – not sure when. But I will most certainly update the article as or when I learn more.